Seán O'Casey (Irish: Seán Ó Cathasaigh[ˈʃaːn̪ˠ oː ˈkahəsˠiː]; born John Casey; 30 March 1880 – 18 September 1964) was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.

O'Casey was born at 85 Upper Dorset Street, Dublin, as John Casey, the son of Michael Casey, a mercantile clerk, and Susan Archer.[1] His family background was "shabby genteel", and not, as often assumed, the working-class culture in which his plays are set. His parents were Protestants and he was a member of the Church of Ireland, baptised on 28 July 1880 in St. Mary's parish,[2] confirmed at St John the Baptist Church in Clontarf,[3] and an active member of Saint Barnabas until his mid-twenties,[3] when he drifted away from the church.

O'Casey's father died when Seán was just six years of age, leaving a family of thirteen.[3] The family lived a peripatetic life thereafter, moving from house to house around north Dublin. As a child, he suffered from poor eyesight, which interfered somewhat with his early education, but O'Casey taught himself to read and write by the age of thirteen.

He left school at fourteen and worked at a variety of jobs, including a nine-year period as a railwayman on the GNR. O'Casey worked in Eason's for a short while, in the newspaper distribution business, but was sacked for not taking off his cap when collecting his wage packet.[4]

In March 1914 he became General Secretary of Larkin's Irish Citizen Army, which would soon be run by James Connolly. On 24 July 1914 he resigned from the ICA, after his proposal to deny dual membership to both the ICA and the Irish Volunteers was rejected.

One of his first satirical ballads, "The Grand Oul' Dame Britannia", was published in The Workers' Republic on 15 January 1916 under his penname An Gall Fada.[6]

"Ah, what is all the fuss about?", says the grand old dame Britannia,"Is it us you are trying to live without?", Says the grand old dame Britannia."Shut your ears to the Sinn Féin lies, you know every Gael for England dies,""And you'll have Home Rule 'neath the clear blue skies." Says the grand old dame Britannia.

In 1917, his friend Thomas Ashe died in a hunger strike and it inspired him to write. He wrote two laments: one in verse and a longer one in prose.[7] Ballads authored around this time by O'Casey featured in the two editions of Songs of the Wren, published in 1918; these included "The Man from the Daily Mail", which, along with "The Grand Oul' Dame Britannia", became Irish rebel music staples. A common theme was opposition to Irish conscription into the British Army during the First World War.

He spent the next five years writing plays. In 1918, when both his sister and mother died (in January and September, respectively), the St Laurence O'Toole National Club commissioned him to write the play The Frost in the Flower. He had been in the St Laurence O'Toole Pipe Band and played on the hurling team. The club declined to put the play on out of fear that its satirical treatment of several parishioners would cause resentment. O'Casey then submitted the play to the Abbey Theatre, which also rejected it but encouraged him to continue writing. Eventually, O'Casey expanded the play to three acts and retitled it The Harvest Festival.

O'Casey's first accepted play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1923. This was the beginning of a relationship that was to be fruitful for both theatre and dramatist but which ended in some bitterness.

The play deals with the impact of revolutionary politics on Dublin's slums and their inhabitants, and is understood to be set in Mountjoy Square, where he lived during the 1916 Easter Rising. It was followed by Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The former deals with the effect of the Irish Civil War on the working class poor of the city, while the latter is set in Dublin in 1916 around the Easter Rising. Both plays deal realistically with the rhetoric and dangers of Irish patriotism, with tenement life, self-deception, and survival; they are tragi-comedies in which violent death throws into relief the blustering masculine bravado of characters such as Jack Boyle and Joxer Daly in Juno and the Paycock and the heroic resilience of Juno herself or of Bessie Burgess in The Plough and the Stars.[8]Juno and the Paycock became a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

The Plough and the Stars was not well received by the Abbey audience and resulted in scenes reminiscent of the riots that greeted J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. There was a riot reported on the fourth night of the show. His depiction of sex and religion even offended some of the actors, who refused to speak their lines. The full-scale riot occurred partly because the play was thought to be an attack on the men in the rising and partly in protest in opposition to the animated appearance of a prostitute in Act 2.[9]W. B. Yeats got onto the stage and roared at the audience: "You have disgraced yourselves again."[10] The takings of the play were substantial compared with the previous week. O'Casey gave up his job and became a full-time writer.

After the incident, even though the play was well liked by most of the Abbey goers, Liam O'Flaherty, Austin Clarke and F. R. Higgins launched an attack against it in the press. O'Casey believed it was an attack on Yeats, that they were using O'Casey's play to berate Yeats.

In 1952 he appeared in a play by Irish playwright Teresa Deevy called "The Wild Goose"[11] in which he played the part of Father Ryan. O'Casey was involved in numerous productions with the Abbey; these can be found in the Abbey Archives.[12]

While in London to receive the Hawthornden Prize and supervise the West End production of Juno and the Paycock, O'Casey fell in love with Eileen Carey. The couple were married in 1927 and remained in London until 1938,[13] when they moved to Totnes.

Study of Seán O'Casey by Dublin artist Reginald Gray, for the New York Times (1966)

The plays O'Casey wrote after this included the darkly allegorical Within the Gates (1934), which is set within the gates of a busy city park based on London's Hyde Park. Although it was highly controversial, Eugene O'Neill responded positively to it. The play was originally going to be a film script for Alfred Hitchcock. O'Casey's widow described it in her memoirs, Sean (1971):

"Originally he had imagined it as a film in which everything, from flower-beds to uniforms, would be stylised. Beginning at dawn and ending at midnight, to the soft chime of Big Ben in the distance, it would be 'geometrical and emotional, the emotions of the living characters to be shown against their own patterns and the patterns of the Park.' Having got so far, he wrote to Alfred Hitchcock, and when Hitchcock and his wife dined with us Sean explained his ideas to an apparently responsive hearer. Hitchcock and he talked excitedly. They parted on the same terms, with the prospect of another immediate meeting, and Sean never heard again."[7]

The Star Turns Red (1940) is a four-act political allegory in which the Star of Bethlehem turns red. The story follows Big Red (who was based on O'Casey's friend, James Larkin) who is a trade-union leader. The union takes over the unnamed country despite the ruthless efforts of the Saffron Shirts, a fascist organisation openly supported by the Roman Catholic hierarchy of the country. It was staged by Unity Theatre in London during 1940 (later, in 1978 by the Abbey in Dublin).

Purple Dust (1943) follows two wealthy, materialistic English stockbrokers who buy an ancient Irish mansion and attempt to restore it with their wrong notions of Tudor customs and taste. They try to impose upon a community with vastly different customs and lifestyles that are much closer to ancient Gaelic ways and are against such false values.

Seán O'Casey's childhood home. Upper Dorset Street, Dublin.

The Englishmen set their opposing standards against those represented by the men employed to renovate the house. In the resulting confrontation the English are satirised and in the end disappointed when a symbolic storm destroys their dream of resettling the old into the present. The hint that is enforced by the conclusion is that the little heap of purple dust that remains will be swept away by the rising winds of change, like the residue of pompous imperialism that abides in Ireland. The show has been compared to Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, which was one of O'Casey's favourites, but aside from a few similarities, there are no real grounds for comparison.[7]

He also penned Red Roses for Me (1943), which saw him move away from his early style in favour of more expressionistic means and overtly socialist content to his writing. It went up at Dublin's Olympia Theatre (which was the first one produced in Ireland in seventeen years). It would move on to London in 1946, where O'Casey himself was able to see it. This was the first show of his own he saw since Within The Gates in 1934.[7]

Oak Leaves and Lavender (1945) is a propaganda play commemorating the Battle of Britain and Britain's heroism in the anti-Nazi crusade and it takes place in a manor with shadowy 18th century figures commenting on the present.[7]

These plays have never had the same critical or popular success as the early trilogy. After the Second World War he wrote Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), which is perhaps his most beautiful and exciting work. From The Bishop's Bonfire (1955) O'Casey's late plays are studies on the common life in Ireland, "Irish microcosmos", like The Drums of Father Ned (1958).

In 1959, O'Casey gave his blessing to a musical adaptation of Juno and the Paycock by American composer Marc Blitzstein. The musical, retitled Juno, was a commercial failure, closing after only 16 Broadway performances. It was also panned by some critics as being too "dark" to be an appropriate musical, a genre then almost invariably associated with light comedy. However, the music, which survives in a cast album made before the show opened, has since been regarded as some of Blitzstein's best work. Although endorsed by the then 79-year-old O'Casey, he did not contribute to the production or even see it during its brief run. Despite general agreement on the brilliance of the underlying material, the musical has defied all efforts to mount any successful revival.

His eightieth birthday occurred in 1960, and to celebrate, David Krause and Robert Hogan wrote full-length studies. The Mermaid Theatre in London launched the "O'Casey Festival" in 1962, which in turn made more theatre establishments put on his works, mostly in Britain and Germany.[7] It is in the late years that O'Casey put his creative energy into his six-volume Autobiography.

O'Casey was married to Irish actress Eileen Carey Reynolds (1903–1995)[15] from 1927 to his death. The couple had three children: two sons, Breon and Níall (who died in 1957 of leukaemia), and a daughter, Shivaun.[7][16]

In 2005, David H. Greene donated a collection of letters he received from O'Casey from 1944 to 1962 to the Fales Library at New York University. Also in the collection are two letters written by Eileen O'Casey and one letter addressed to Catherine Greene, David Greene's spouse.